Atmospheres of Porto Nicolas Dorval-Bory

When I first came to Portugal, a friend told me a story about the azulejos. According to it, in the 16th century, as Vasco de Gama opened a new route to Asia, Portugal started new commercial trades with China, then under the Ming Dynasty. While they were struggling back home to protect the façade of the buildings from the harsh oceanic climate and its salty rain storms, the far east explorers discovered the high quality of Chinese ceramics. There used to make pots and bowls, which apparently resisted extremely well to the daily use of salty soup, they thought it would be a good idea to import this technique to make those ceramics a façade material. Finally, azulejos pattern influences where just cultural vehicles for a universal and very pragmatic goal : resist to salt water.

This story might or might not be entirely true – we all know the complexity of influences of techniques throughout history – I feel it still tells us two important things that we could consider as architects. First, construction is about pure basic physics, it is about finding strategies for environmental management, as Reyner Banham put it, to create a climate that is acceptable for human being. Second, construction comes before, or below, culture, and one could define architecture as the exact moment when culture steps in. It’s the act of converting an ingenious solitary idea into something abstract, replicable, adaptable. Stacking stones is construction, calling it a column becomes architecture.

In this studio, we are exploring this definition in a contemporary context, where both science and comfort requirements are reaching unprecedented levels of precision and complexity, while the planet is suffering from the excess of our unsustainable way of life.

Somehow inspired by the contrasted garden scene of Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad, where two types of light create an uncanny visual tension, we are trying to invent radical spaces emerging from portuense atmospheric qualities, looking for extremes and oppositions in the specific parameters of climate.

First, students choose one of those parameters : radiation heat, convection heat, spectral quality of light, intensity of light, humidity, ventilation, noise. They then look for, in Porto, various opposed urban or interior situations that reflect this particular quality. One space with high radiation, another one where surrounding materials absorbs your radiation. One humid space, and a dry one. An area with poor spectrum light, another one with a good CRI…

It is their duty to extract from these situations, through very precise CAD drawings and photos, the material elements responsible for their atmosphere. We are aiming for the simplest devices, the modern mundane equipment or archaic forms that define those qualities.

Finally, students rebuild these contrasted situations in one elementary composition, a very direct way to divide – or dissolve – space.

Nothing New Ingredients

A collection of rooms, buildings and spaces found in Porto